1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to the rendering of documents to a user in a content management system.
2. Background Art
A content management system (CMS) allows many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content.
A content management system may be accessed by a number of different users in a number of different roles. For example, a content management system might store documents defined by a drug labeling grammar for drugs developed by a pharmaceutical company. The drug labeling grammar could be divided into multiple sections, including: basic drug information that may include the drug's name, description, dosage, etc; the drug's empirical formula; the drug's active ingredients; the drug's inactive ingredients; adverse reactions; and other suitable information, such as a copyright notice. A non-technical author using this CMS to generate a certain drug label may only be interested in the basic drug information section, and may have no need to view the other sections of the document. On the other hand, a scientist that is working exclusively on the adverse effects of the drug might not care to see any of the basic drug information. A supervisor in the CMS may need to see certain sections at times and may need to see the entire document at other times. In the prior art, a document is typically rendered to all users the same or may be rendered differently based on user role or other criteria; however, a document's prior usage is not taken into consideration when the document is rendered. Without a way to detect a user's activity for a document and render the document according to the user's previous activity, content management systems will continue to render a document in the same statically defined ways, regardless of a user's individual need to access different sections of the document based on context and usage trends.